In an effort to organize information, personal information manager application programs have provided an electronic work environment which encompasses scheduling, electronic mail management, task management ("to-do" lists), and contact management. Contact manager programs allow computer users to keep track of only actions that are important and to view those actions together in such a way that is useful. Contact managers are frequently used to store personal contacts and serve as a type of computerized address book. Many computer applications have features that serve as "contact managers" that organize relevant data that a person has entered related to the contacts. Although some contact managers provide multiple fields that may be used to store information about a contact, contact managers generally store or file the information according to a single preselected field. For example, conventional contact managers typically sort contact records based on a single field related to corresponding contact information, such as in alphabetical order by last name or company name. This forces a user to enter false data in certain fields so that the contact manager can sort in a more usable fashion preferred by the user. For example, the user may enter a company name in a "Last name" field because the type of business is more easily remembered by the user and because the user would prefer to see the contact in a sorted list that is not exclusively sorted by company names. Additionally, the user may prefer to file or sort by the first name or some other identifier for another contact.
Thus, there is a need in the art for a method of identifing data records that provides a useful option that organizes records automatically according to a selected label designated by the user. There is also a need in the art to provide a mechanism to automatically update a filing identifier if information upon which the filing identifier is based changes.